APPLICATION OF LANDSCAPE METRICS AND GIS TECHNIQUES FOR ASSESSMENT OF LAND USE AND LAND COVER CHANGES IN THE SUCEAVA RIVER BASIN, ROMANIA

Land use and land cover integrate various aspects of natural and socio-economic features of the environment. Land use and cover change reflect the interaction among the environmental features and processes and human activities. After the collapse of the socialism regime in 1989, Romania has undergone significant changes at the level of socio-economic and institutional profile, which determined land use scientists to consider our country to be an experimental territory for land use research. Considering land use and cover plots as pieces of landscape configuration, landscape metrics can provide valuable information about structural changes occurred in land use and cover spatial pattern. Using the Suceava River Basin from Romania as a case study, a hybrid geographical approach applying landscape metrics and GIS techniques was applied to analyse the spatial and temporal dynamics of land use and cover pattern changes between 1990 and 2012. In order to assess the land use and cover changes, we used a series of relevant landscape metrics at class and landscape level in order to quantify the landscape composition and its spatial configuration. The analysis was carried out using CORINE Land Cover datasets from 1990, 2000, 2006 and 2012 by means of geographic information systems to present the spatial distribution of the data, while FRAGSTATS software was employed to process landscape metrics in order to generate statistics about landscape structure. The results highlight an increase in the number of patches and edge density, while the mean patch size decreased during the span of 22 years. Consequently, the landscape structure of Suceava River Basin became more fragmented and heterogeneous. We hope that the present approach will underline the importance of using landscape metrics in monitoring land use and cover changes over time by decision makers as a powerful basis of sustainable land use planning at the entire basin level.